Readings Give Import To Representative Democracy

July 03, 1996|By DAVID BRODER Columnist

If the good feelings that Independence Day evokes are something you would like to prolong, I have two books to recommend for your summer reading. Both of them, believe me, will deepen your appreciation of this country, its history and its people.

The first, published last year, is ``The Nightingale's Song'' by Robert Timberg, a first-class journalist at The Baltimore Sun. It is the story of five men whose lives, like the author's, have been decisively shaped by the Naval Academy and the Vietnam War.

Three of them became famous, in different ways, because of the Iran-Contra scandal: former Reagan administration National Security Council officials Robert C. (Bud) McFarlane, John Poindexter and Oliver L. (Ollie) North. The fourth is the mercurial James H. Webb Jr., novelist and onetime Navy secretary. And the fifth is John S. McCain III, a Vietnam POW and now senator from Arizona.

``The five major characters in this book,'' Timberg writes, ``display vast differences in personality and style, but some remarkably similar strains as well. In a way, though none would be comfortable with this characterization, they are secret sharers, men whose experiences at Annapolis and during the Vietnam War and its aftermath illuminate a generation, or a portion of a generation - those who went. Each in his own way stands as a flesh-and-blood repository of that generation's anguish and sense of betrayal. Whatever they later became - hero, hot dog, hustler, or zealot - they were for a time among the best and the brightest this nation had to offer. And in their formative years - at Annapolis and during the Vietnam era - they shared a seemingly unassailable certainty. They believed in America.''

What Timberg has done in this remarkable book is to provide, in the guise of five vivid, interconnected biographies, a contemporary reflection on the meaning, and limits, of patriotism. I guarantee you will not think of these men - or of that powerful abstraction, patriotism, which drove them - in the same way again.

That John McCain could endure what Timberg describes in awful detail and emerge so unembittered that he has become perhaps the most effective advocate of improved relations with Vietnam is a tribute to him - and to the American spirit.

The other book, published this year, is ``Arguing About Slavery,'' by William Lee Miller of the University of Virginia. It is the story of the debates in Congress, three decades before the Civil War, about the terrible institution whose legacy still blights our country.

It is a tale that Miller tells so dramatically that you can believe his statement that his research was pointed toward a different subject, but ``when I came across this one, it grabbed me by the collar, threw me upon the floor, sat upon my chest, and insisted on being told.''

You will, I believe, revel in Miller's telling of the tale. His hero - as unlikely as any of the five Timberg had - is John Quincy Adams, who late in life, after his presidency, returned to Congress and there led the forces condemning slavery with extraordinary courage and skill.

But as patriotism is the larger theme of Timberg's book, Miller's work is a reflection on a topic at least as undervalued these days - representative government. But listen to Miller's words:

``The forefathers of our forefathers gave a discriminating answer to the question about how a people shall be governed. Not by raw authority or command. Not by deference to inherited privilege. Not by the arm-wrestling and bargaining of great chieftains. Not by blind custom and inertia and impulse. They shall be governed instead by a debating society of their own choosing. They shall be governed by themselves - `self-government' - by the instrument of their chosen representatives. That is to say also that they shall be governed by deliberation - by mutual argument and persuasion.''

That fact, which we are so prone to take for granted, was of enormous consequence in the 1830s, even though the debates in Congress did not prevent recourse to arms in the Civil War. But that is the only time in 207 years under our Constitution that Americans have fought each other.

It is of enormous importance today that we have in Congress - with all its faults - a genuine alternative to fighting over each cause which roils the nation.

Timberg and Miller have helped us celebrate the Fourth in the best way - by reflecting on the blessings and obligations of American citizenship.